In retail environments, such as a grocery store, there are generally one or more full-service departments to provide requested products to customers. These full-service departments have weigh stations for use by an operator to weigh and/or label the requested products. In addition, self-service departments may exist where customers select their own product. These self-service departments generally operate similar to full-service departments and have self-service stations that include weigh stations for use by customers to weigh and/or label their own product.
An example full-service department is a Meat and Deli department where operators prepare (e.g. slice), weigh, label and package a requested product for the customer. The customer selects one or more products from a full-service department for purchase and requests a certain quantity of a product to be purchased. The quantity may be in terms of weight, number of slices, number of units, a particular length, and the like. If the customer requests a product sold by unit, it may be unnecessary to weigh the product on the weigh station. However, the weigh station may still be used to prepare the product, such as to generate a label to be affixed to a product package.
Regardless of whether the product is sold by weight or by unit, the product preparation requires a series of weighing and labeling transactions to be performed by an operator using a weigh station. Each product has an associated product code or a product identifier. The weigh station operator can input the product identifier into the weigh station so that a product price can be determined and/or a label can be generated. The label typically contains the product description, price per weight/unit, total package price, total package weight/units, the package date or sell by date and a UPC code containing a product code.
At the weigh station, the preparing, weighing and labeling transaction time can be short (e.g. a few seconds) or long (e.g. several minutes) depending on the number of products selected by the customer and complexity of the product preparation. While the preparation of the food product is occurring the customer has nothing to do but wait for the operator to finish preparing the product.
Accordingly, there exists an opportunity to provide information to a customer at a weigh station at which the customer is being served.